Monday, November 7, 2016

If you want to vote, vote third-party (even in 2016)

Four years ago I wrote an article in the JHU News-Letter titled “Cast
your vote for a third-party candidate.” In that article, I lamented what I thought
was wrong with American politics – and warned that unless people started voting
for third-party candidates, these problems would only grow worse.

What were those problems? First, that “American politics have become a joke” due to “the complete absence of relevant, substantive discourse in modern
political campaigns.” Second, there was “a pervasive lack of public confidence that our elected officials will
be able to solve” the nations problems. And third, that“many Americans are so utterly uninspired by either candidate,” but
are “told they should choose one of them
anyway,” eroding the public’s belief that they have any meaningful say in
how they are governed. I elaborated:

"The two-party system has proven itself
incapable of presenting Americans with distinct, adaptive, varied choices that
respond to their evolving demands in a timely manner. Instead, it creates
duopoly on the services government offers, which is used to prevent any
alternate choice from serious consideration….

Americans are beginning to
recognize that contrary to mainstream rhetoric, the problem isn’t that one side
is right while the other side is wrong. It’s more accurate to say they’re both
wrong. It has become abundantly clear that whatever ails our nation cannot be
fixed by either of these two parties as they currently operate. Although we
claim to live in a democracy in which the people decide how they’re governed,
there is a significant discord between what the voters want and what their
government gives them. This is the deep-rooted problem that citizens have
detected with American democracy.”

So, you tell me: have these problems gotten worse?

I hate to toot my own horn, but it seems to me they have. Over a
million Americans followed my advice in 2012.
Roughly 125 million did not. I warned those 125 million that voting
for candidates “even though you don’t really like them sends parties the message
that they can nominate whoever they please without jeopardizing your support, so
long as they abuse you less than the other guy.” Four years later,
that seems prescient. If the 2016 presidential election has proven anything,
it’s that Americans hate both candidates more than ever before.

Now tell me another thing. If you were unsatisfied with your choices in 2012, and
are even less satisfied with your choices today, how unsatisfied must you get before you stand up and reject those choices?
What would it take for you to do that? Where do you draw the line, and is there any good reason you haven’t
drawn it already?

My aim today is to convince you there is not. Contrary to the dominant popular narrative and endless apathy-shaming peer pressure that accompanies this day, it is not "so important" that you go vote, and the 2016 election is not the most important of your lifetime. Although the differences between the two major
candidates are starker than they were four years ago, the logic of voting for a
third-party candidate still applies, and it goes something like this:

Your vote won’t change a damn thing.

Knowing that, the only reason to vote is if it
makes you feel good.

Voting for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump
should not make you feel good.

Voting for a third-party candidate who shares
your values might make you feel good, and in any case is the most productive
and meaningful vote you can cast.

Therefore, if you want to vote, you should vote for
a third party candidate.

Let's explore all four of
these contentions in greater detail.

1. Your vote won’t change a damn thing.

It’s at this part of the argument that I should clarify something: I
don’t really care if you vote for a third-party candidate. It would be awesome if you do, but I won’t be
upset with you or think less of you as a person if I learn you didn’t.

This is because voting, from the perspective of any individual deciding how to vote, is an unimportant waste of time. It simply does not matter. No vote you have
ever cast for any political office in your entire life – and especially for
President – has changed the outcome of that election. Anyone who believes otherwise is in desperate
need of a
math lesson. Consider the following:

Two-thirds of our country reside in
non-swing states, whose Electoral College vote allocation is already certain.

Even in swing states, your vote has a
0.0% chance of changing which candidate gets your states votes.No qualifying adverb, like “essentially” or
“practically” 0%, is necessary; the decimal stretches so far beyond the number
of significant figures our society commonly employs that 0% is the statistically
accurate representation of that probability.You are likelier to be struck by lightning on a sunny day while standing
in line at the polling place.You are
likelier to be electrocuted by the voting machine.You are FAR likelier to die in a car crash on
the way to vote or on the way back from voting. It has never happened before,
and never will in the future, that one vote has swung the outcome of an entire
state. Your voice is simply not that important. Sorry if that makes you feel unheard, but if you're of voting age it’s high time someone ripped
off the Band-Aid.

Even if your local advocacy were so
persuasive that you convinced 100 additional people to vote for your candidate,
it still will almost certainly not matter.The smallest margin of victory in any state in any presidential election
in the modern era was New Mexico in 2000, which Al Gore won by 366 votes.Not that many people read your shit on
Facebook, and even if they did, you’re not that persuasive anyway.

All Gore still lost that election,
you’ll recall, which reminds us that even if your vote and voice were to
miraculously swing the result in your state, you’d only have an 18% chance of
changing the outcome of the election as a whole – if you live in Florida.That’s according to Real Clear Politics,
which calculates that the outcome in Florida has an 18% chance of determining
the outcome of the election at large.That’s the highest chance of any state.Only three states have more than a 10% chance; only nine have more than
a 2% chance. Most Americans live in states with less than a 1% chance of
determining the election. So for you to actually “choose” the next president,
you’d have to multiply your infinitesimal, statistically zero-percent chance of
swinging your state by ANOTHER super low percentage.

To hear some people tell it, if you don’t like those odds, you are a
selfish vain spoiled unpatriotic asshole who hates our
troops, disrespects our veterans' sacrifice, and doesn’t appreciate just how good you have it. You have also, if they
are to be believed, forfeited your right to complain. As George Carlin famously noted, that is complete hogwash.

Voting is a right – not an obligation. The only people who forfeit the right to
complain about the President are the people who DO vote, and do so for the
winning candidate. They got their way; if things don’t turn out, they have
nobody to blame but themselves. But nobody
else in society played any role in creating the lamentable conditions, and as
such have every right to complain as loudly as they please. There is no civic duty to spend hours in
line awaiting an opportunity to kiss the state’s ass – which is all voting
is, once you realize your vote doesn’t matter. There are no moral implications
at play, and you shouldn’t feel guilty if you choose not to involve yourself. There has never been a better time to not
vote, nor a time when your vote was less statistically important than it is
now.

2. Knowing that, the
only reason to vote is if it makes you feel good.

Not everything you do needs to accomplish something. For example,
many Christians attend church every Christmas Eve, even if they don’t particularly
like church, and don’t ordinarily attend at other times of the year. This is
not because they believe attendance on that one day a year will actually make
the difference between their going to heaven and their going to hell; it’s just
something they feel obliged to do, in concert with others in their community,
at the designated date. They do it in part to pay respect to a social custom
they’ve been taught from an early age is venerable and sacred and bigger than
themselves. They also do it in part because they leave the service feeling
fulfilled and connected to their community through a shared experience.

So it is with voting: it’s mostly something we do to make
ourselves feel good. Voting is a ritual we perform out of tradition, out of
respect for certain hallowed institutions, because we’ve been taught from an
early age that it’s the socially expected way to honor the lofty principles of
democracy. It’s akin to the thrill of buying a lottery ticket: in the back of
your mind, you know it’s a silly and inefficient expenditure of resources, but the drama of it provides a certain fleeting excitement anyway.

This is why I vote: for purely symbolic purposes, it makes me feel
better to know I’m doing what little I can to nudge our country’s policy in the
direction I think it should go. It’s not especially productive, but neither is
playing video games, and Lord knows I do plenty of that. If it makes you feel
good too, and you know what you’re talking about, why not?

Not everyone is like me, though. If you don’t leave the ballot
box feeling fulfilled by having performed this ritual, or don’t know enough
about the election to feel qualified picking one over the other, my advice is
to stay home and spare yourself the hassle. Don’t feel guilty about it either.
Spend five minutes donating to an online charity instead, and you will have
done more good for the world than any condescending blowhard who tries to shame you for it. There are over
13 million things you could do with your time that will
make more of a difference, and you can rest assured that your decision won’t
change the outcome of the election anyway.

But whether you do or don’t, the main point is this: once you
understand that voting is just a ritual you perform to make yourself feel good, there’s no
point in voting for anybody who doesn’t make you feel good. It
makes zero rational sense to “vote strategically”, as the strategically
sensible move is always to do
something else besides vote.

The realization that your vote won’t change a thing is depressing at first, but
eventually it’s liberating: it means you can afford to indulge your conscience. No matter how much is at stake, you can rest assured that you won’t be responsible for whatever
happens.

As I said above, the whole glorified process of ceremoniously adding your drop
to the bucket is sort of silly, even when you really believe in the person
you’re voting for. When you don’t, it’s downright sad! I suppose there’s a
certain patriotic symbolism in sacrificing your time to stand up for your
principles, whether or not it makes a difference. But there’s nothing more tragic than standing
in the cold for hours on end just to halfheartedly signal your inaudible
support for someone you detest! That’s
not responsible citizenship, that’s just being a sucker.

You can’t romanticize about the importance of “making your voice
heard” in one breath, and then in the next implore people to vote for the lesser
evil – against their voice’s true preference – out of cold, calculating
strategic cynicism. If voting for a
third-party candidate is throwing your vote away, it’s only because voting for
ANYBODY is throwing your vote away. And if voting really matters and works, then how can it be meaningless to vote for what you believe in? You can’t straddle both sides of the
argument. Either elections are a noble solicitation of the popular will, or
they’re a sham you have no obligation to take part in. Whichever you choose to believe, voting for
Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is a bad answer, for reasons I will now
enumerate.

3. Voting for Donald
Trump or Hillary Clinton should not make you feel good.

I mentioned earlier that I don’t really care if you vote for a
third-party candidate. That’s true. What I care most about is that you NOT vote
for a major-party candidate. For your sake, I would much rather you stay home.

You should not vote for a major party candidate in 2016 because
those candidates are Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton embodies everything that’s
wrong with American politics. Donald
Trump embodies everything that’s wrong with the Nazi politics. This means voting for Donald Trump is inexcusable, and voting for Hillary Clinton
is a waste of time.

For brevity’s sake, I have decided to house the justifications for
point #3 on a separate page, accessible below via hyperlink. Unfortunately, the list of reasons why voting
for these candidates should not make you feel good is rather extensive, and it
disrupted the flow of my overall argument to include another six pages of text
on this page. Besides, if you’re like
most Americans, I’m already preaching to the choir here, so it seemed wasteful
to interrupt the larger point by beating a dead horse. On the slim chance you don't already know this, here is why you
shouldn’t feel good about voting for Donald Trump.

4. Voting for a third-party candidate who shares
your values might make you feel good, and in any case is the most productive
and statistically meaningful vote you can cast. Therefore, if you want to vote,
you should vote for a third party candidate.

I’ll begin this final salvo by again referencing my frustration back in
2012:

“Each election seasons brings a fresh batch of meaningless,
infantile banter about irrelevant distractor issues. Each campaign speech seems
designed only to rile up a target audience instead of addressing the nation’s
actual problems. Each party blames the other for all the nation’s woes, and yet
no matter which party wins things only ever seem to get worse. Time and time
again, bold promises become bald-faced lies, and Americans lose faith in their
leaders’ competence and motives. With so much misplaced trust in prior politicians,
it’s no wonder that so many Americans are so utterly uninspired by either
candidate this year.

What they’ve been told over and over again is that they should
choose one of them anyway. The importance of that “choice” is constantly
stressed by the media and by politicians from both major parties. “The outcome
of this election”, they tell us, “is too important to waste your vote on anyone
else.”

If this was evident in the 2012 election, the 2016 election has
proven it to the point of parody. Most
Republicans hate Trump, but they will vote for him anyway on the laughable
pretense that “a vote for a third-party is a vote for Hillary!” Most Democrats
detest Clinton, but they will vote for her anyway on the plainly false belief that “a
vote for third-party is a vote for Trump!” Both parties face fierce internal tumult and dissention, but the one thing
holding them together is an overwhelming fear of the other side. They reflexively regurgitate the tired trope that voting
3rd Party is "throwing your vote away" because those parties cannot win - as if it were written into the code of the universe that two
broken, corrupt, unprincipled, fear-mongering, power-hungry parties are the
only conceivable options to govern human affairs.

Fuck em. Don’t cave to their fear-mongering. Don’t give them what they want from you. South Park’s parody of this absurdity is over-quoted, but I’m
going to quote it again: it isn’t your patriotic duty to choose between a Giant Douche and
a Turd Sandwich.
The emotion which drives you to spend your afternoon at the ballot box
on November 8th should not be fear.
The fact that it will be, for millions of Americans this year, proves only that over the long term our enemy is not Trump and it is not Clinton. The enemy holding this country back is the
myth that we have to pick one of them.

Voting for a major party candidate exacerbates that problem, even
if only by a puny margin. An anarchist
friend of mine has a t-shirt that reads “Don’t vote – it only encourages them.” He’s largely right. Buying into the false dichotomy of entrenched
power brokers strengthens their belief that they can do whatever they want and govern however they please without fear of losing your support, so long as they remain the second worst option. Prove them wrong.

Voting third-party is not
merely the most idealistic choice, but also the most pragmatic.
Gary Johnson doesn’t have a very good chance of winning – at all – but he has a
much, much better chance of winning than your vote has of influencing the
outcome of the election. And unlike the
major party candidates, casting a vote for Johnson sends a productive and
important message even if he loses.

If Johnson gets more than 5% of the popular vote (which your vote
has a much higher statistical chance of ensuring than it does of flipping the
victor, considering he’s currently polling at 4.6%) the Libertarian Party will get
guaranteed ballot access and qualify for matching federal funds in the 2020
election. That is incredibly
significant. At present, over 90% of the efforts of third-party campaigns are
consumed by just trying to win ballot access in all 50 states. Clearing that
hurdle would allow them to set their sights on inclusion in the Presidential
debates next year.

If you like Johnson the most of the three, but you’re still nervous
about your least-preferred evil winning the election, try this. Go to http://balancedrebellion.com/,
click on what state you’re from and which major party candidate you’d vote for
were there no third-party option, and they will use your Facebook profile to
literally find you a match from the other side.
So if you’d otherwise vote Clinton but would prefer Johnson, they will
link you with a Republican who would otherwise vote Trump but also prefers
Johnson, and let you chat. If you both
agree to vote Johnson instead, Johnson’s tally will go up by two and neither of
the two evils will be advantaged nor disadvantaged by your actions.

If you don’t want to vote, don’t bother. But if you do want to
vote, cast a vote that actually matters to you, instead of wasting it on
someone you don’t believe in. My 2012
closing argument still applies:

“If [either major
nominee] is everything you’ve ever dreamed of in a candidate, then by all means
vote for them. But if not, I urge you to look at the bigger picture this
November. Ask yourself if you’re really satisfied with the amount of choice you
have in how you are governed. Set aside any lukewarm tolerance for the side
that annoys you the least, and objectively ask yourself whether either of these
two candidates truly deserve your vote. If the answer is no, don’t give it to
them. Halfheartedly picking the lesser of two evils will do little to truly
alter our nation’s course. Instead, vote for real change, and send a message
that you expect a real choice in the future. Vote for a third party candidate.”